Why Phone Call Analytics Can Optimize Your Facebook Ad ROI

At #SMWCHICAGO, Dialogtech showed attendees how well Facebook ads can influence and generate phone call conversions, improve ROI, and acquire more customers.

In today’s smartphone and social platform-driven world, converting consumers by calling might seem like a thing of the past, but that’s far from the truth.

At Social Media Week Chicago, two members of the Dialogtech team including Director of Content Marketing, Blair Symes, and Director of Digital Media and Analytics, Kelley Schultz showed attendees how well Facebook ads can influence and generate phone call conversions, improve ROI, and acquire more customers.

A few stats in support of this argument include that there were 5.7 billion calls in 2014 calls to U.S. businesses from Facebook and social ads and, 12.2 billion in 2016. Experts expect this number to triple in 2019. Finally, over 500 percent growth in calls is expected from 2014 to 2019.

Why are the Facebook numbers so staggering?

Facebook is a mobile-first app. Click-to-call is much easier and faster than filling out a web form. This is demonstrated by the fact that 89 percent of Facebook’s users access the platform via mobile device. Further, 56 percent of monthly users only access Facebook on mobile and 87 percent of Facebook U.S. ad spend is dedicated to mobile.

Businesses with products or services that are complex, expensive, or infrequent, or urges get phone calls.

This is great news for marketers because phone calls have proven to be a much higher quality lead than online conversions. According to research conducted by Forrester, customers who initiate inbound calls convert faster, spend more, and have a higher retention rate. Calls convert to revenue 10x-15x more than web leads. Calls will also influence $1 trillion in U.S. consumer spending this year.

Converting ads into calls

If your business has the potential to convert ads into call, getting detailed attribution for every call is a must.

Here are problems that most marketers face:

You lose credit and intelligence for up to 50 percent or more of your conversions.

Visitors from Facebook ads that result in valuable calls appear to be bounces.

You allocate budget to underperforming Facebook ads and landing pages.

You can’t prove the true ROI of Facebook ad spend.

Using data to optimize your strategy

If you don’t know what is generating phone calls, you can be putting money into campaigns that aren’t working. You define the target audience at the ad set, and the more detailed you are with these, the better understanding you will have with respect to your ROI. More specifically, if you know where exactly your ads are running and succeeding, you can break out your campaigns into very specific placements and devote budget to improving the ROI on those specific ads.

The key theme here is to consistently look for ways to use your data to optimize your current strategy surrounding your ads. Otherwise, these figures are unable to be meaningful or effective to you.

How To Use Performance Metrics

Customize the columns to show the performance metrics relevant to your brand and goals.

Compare date against time frames from prior day, week, month, and year.

Breakdown the data by location/business locations, age/gender, time of day, and placement/device.

Ensure top performing ads and audiences are not capping out on budget.

Targeting is critical to Facebook ad ROI. You can use targeting data like date and time, education, age, interests, relationship, website visits, and more to target consumers with the right message on the right screen at the right time. But how do phone calls come into play?

Inbound calls are valuable data that can signal lead quality and purchasing intent and how the person wants to engage. With such information, Marketers can determine a proper budget allocation as well as the right ad and landing page.

On Facebook, you can actually schedule optimizations that will improve conversions.

Use a lifetime budget (instead of daily cap), which will allow you to run ads on a specific schedule

Get performance and audience data by day/hour and target those in ad sets to maximize your budget

Run lead gen ads and ensure you have sales staff available to convert leads quickly and effectively

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SMW Staff

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